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Philadelphia Considering Municipal Wi-Fi
sebFlyte writes "The row over Muni Wi-Fi continues as cities and other municipal authorities consider building massive Wi-Fi networks to give lots of people low-cost wireless net access. CNET is running an article written by the CIO for the city of Philadelphia, explaining why she thinks it's time to break the telcos de-facto monopoly and for public agencies to start offering public services." We have previous covered Taipei's efforts along these lines to create a for-pay service
People winging about how poor the service is.
Talkshow hosts berating the government for more give-aways of taxpayer dollars (sponsored by some telco)
Saturation and further complaints (my taxdollars pay for, won't stand for it, etc)
Ultimately it'll actually be pretty good service.
Why is this a good idea anyway? Look at the stranglehold Cable TV has on communities. (oh, sure you can go satellite, but it's still not price competitive because they're pricing to compete with near monopolies) If municipalities insisted cable could be laid under the condition a cable company will sell, at a reasonable price, bandwidth on their cable to competitors, would we be paying such huge prices?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This has been on slashdot months ago:5 8.shtml?tid=193&tid=4
http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/04/09/25/2202
with a reference to the original statement from Philadelphia
http://www.phila.gov/wireless/briefing.html
--
from-the-sort-out-the-duplicates dept.
I thought that PA made a law banning that?
Public networks to fileshare on!
Dashboard Widgets
would do something like that.
Starting the late 90's they were being very public about pushing to the front of being "wired"... even got a Yahoo! "Most wired city" award for 2000. That was all on an effort to get the city ringed with fiber. I guess once they got their high-speed net to all the city buildings and schools, their interest pretty much fizzled, leaving the city-zens still not quite on of the game... I still can't get DSL.
I would prefer them to fix all of the potholes first...
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
I am OK with municipal utilities, I think it is inappropriate to make it free. If there is a need among the low-income, offer discounts or make it free for them on a need basis. Having your users pay by default would more likely pay for the setup.
I am no fan of the DSL / cable duopoly, but not giving them or other commercial interests a chance would be a disservice to tax payers due to the potential for waste and stifles competition from viable alternatives.
If they choose to use a technology more suited for a WAN deployment, like the unproven WiMax, this is more of a political move than anything else. The government is trying to look like it is hip with technology and attract the tech-savvy crowd. However, such a deployment is not good for competition, as governments receive special tax-exempt status and would either take many companies out of the market completely, or lend a huge advantage who whomever the government contracts. And what happens when the technology / project goes belly up? In the normal market, companies go bankrupt. The government, however, will just throw (and waste) more money at it.
While I like the idea in general I don't think Philly should doing this. The city has been so broke these last few years that they're closing firehouses and talking of cutting the police force. Once the city gets its budget in order then they might want to look into this. Not before.
- Apple Computer......proudly going out of business for over twenty years.
It seems that the comparatively extravagant cost of free WiFi versus the number of people who can't even even afford a computer in Philadelphia puts into question why this should be a primary initiative. I agree with the goals in principle but wouldn't those tax dollars do a lot towards helping city schooling? Just a thought.
The ramifications of free wi-fi are greater than just web access... The upshot is of course, free telephone service as well.
This IMHO is where the real problems are going to begin. The telco's aren't just going to lose their internet business over this, they'd lose their businesses.
Not that we'd be sorry to see them go, but it should be acknowleged that we're talking about more than web browsing here.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Philadelphia's move does nothing to telco monopolies. The legislation that allowed the Philly project to go forward also gives Verizon the right to veto any other city in Pennsylvania from doing the same thing.
Is there any proof of this? Never in the history of the United States has the government done anything "low cost". Compare the true cost of shipping a package FedEx versus USPS.
It might cost less for the few hundred thousand subscribers who pay for it, but don't forget all the money taken from the people who don't use it, but who still get to pay for it.
A government granted telco monopoly is a bad thing, but a government run monopoly (amtrak, usps, etc) is worse.
And just imagine how great that customer service will be. It might reach DMV levels of greatness!
And I suppose we can trust the government to provide our network access and not snoop in on us.
Of course, if it does cost too much, has poor service, or impedes on your privacy, you can always switch to the competition...oh wait, they ran the competition under, because "for profit" has become evil.
The city itself shouldn't be talking about forming a monopoly, supporting a monopoly or operating a utility. Instead the city should be doing what it needs to do to facilitate the creation of city-wide mesh networks by private providers.
There are several impediments to the creation of city-wide wireless mesh networks. The first, and perhaps most important, is right of way. The second is cost.
A good model would include the city throwing out an RFP asking for proposals to create a city-wide mesh network that accomplishes the following:
- Covers at least X% of the city, where X is a large enough percentage to ensure that poor areas of the city are at least partially covered in mesh.
- Provides at least X mbps throughput to all users
- Allows independent providers to use the network to provide their own brand of wireless mesh services, for appropriate fees
In exchange, providers get:- The right to borrow money at favorable rates through the use of the city's credit. The city floats bonds, and then loans the money to the chosen provider(s) at the same interest rate as the bonds themselves
- Streamlined approval of right of way throughout the city, probably using the city's lamposts
- A temporary monopoly on some types of premium services on the network (i.e. the provider is forced to allow the rebranding of the regular tier of service, but a higher tier of service [twice as fast?] is the sole province of the provider for X years).
New York City has an interesting plan out there for better cell phone coverage under a similar model: offering right of way on the city's lamposts in exchange for certain guarantees. See New York Times coverage on the subject.Aside from the philosophical discussion on whether this SHOULD be done, I see two implimentation problems:
1) This is going to cause major interference with pre-existing wi-fi networks. I don't use of want my private network degraded by the ever-present WIFI service set up with repeaters throughout the city.
2) It's going to be VERY difficult to get people to be smart about use, and avoid giving out key personal information over the airwaves. Identity theieves already collects lots of information in Starbucks and ball fields. Can you imagine how bad the problem would be with access city-wide?
Looks like Philly has bad schools and no dictionaries either. You can't spell 'ridiculous' and you can't use "its/it's" properly. Stay in Philly, OK?
I post the same reply nearly every time it comes up. The local governments have no business getting into providing internet service let alone WIRELESS internet service.
I read what he had to say and I call BULLSHIT. It is the same politically correct crap they use all the time to slip more government programs. The routine is to use words like underserved, monopoly, and eventually "redlining". They claim that cable companies, telcos, and similar don't provide service to those who cannot afford it or will even use it yet at the same time they claim there is a need!
This is a vote buying scheme with little difference from how senior centers, libraries, and even police precincts are placed.
Here is what will happen. The contracts will be awarded to those companies who can show they adhere to some contrived quota system of workers. Being in philly this might require union workers, specific health benefits, living wage, or even political affliation. These types of companies are usually nothing more that shells held by friends of the mayor or similar placed people (see Atlanta airport for examples of a big city nepotism).
The contract gets awarded. It delivers inferior service requiring even more consultation by people who just happen to be friends of the same people who authorized it or screwed it up.
So eventually it mostly works. We then find out that most of the target people don't have the equipment to use it. So we buy it for them, to include pc and router from "approved companies". We then have to provide training for those who "did not win lifes lottery" of course by those who meet the nepotism requirements.
Then we stuff the administration of the whole shebang by favorites and such.
So we will end up with an overpriced solution that is staffed by people who have no business touching a net. We will pay to stuff pcs and equipment in homes where the people really won't get the true benefit.
I'd rather let a corporation do it, at least they can be held truly accountable. The government will just make your life miserable if you complain or such.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The last time I checked I could also get Internet access from my cable TV company, independent dial-up providers, independent wireless providers. In fact, in my town of 26,000 we have approximately 10 ISPs that are not telephone companies.
Makes me wonder what the hell they're doing in Philly if my little town in Iowa has all of these options available and all of the companies are making profits.
-Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
..an awful lot of cities have already been doing it for a long time.
Including my town, which has had free WiFi covering a large portion of the city for over a year. I and I know for a fact that we aren't the only city doing this, plenty of others in the US already have simmilar setups.
If your home WAP had been using the same channel as the city, tough cookes. Change your channel. Is it really that freaking difficult? Took me less than 30 seconds on my linksys.
The CIO for the city of Philadelphia was at a meeting for Philadelphia Cares that I was also in attendance at. This was a technology summit on how to bridge the technology divide.
At one point in the meeting I suggested that a grassroots effort to creat neighborhood mesh networks could be of great benefit to connecting hte neighborhoods both internally and externally. CIO asked a few questions but didn't seem to want to work with the community on it.
I see where this is going now. Mayor Street's office gets a hold of a great idea that would cost the city very little to implement, but then turns it around to line the pockets of his inner circle. His brother Milton is already busy with a lucrative city contract so maybe it will be someone else in the mayor's family.
But don't take my word for it. Check for yourself.
This service should be free, because it would be very expensive to charge fees, and require authentication to ensure that only fee-paying customers can use the network. I have seen (sorry, no citation) reports that more than half of the cost of running a long-distance phone company goes toward billing the customers! You have to keep track of who-called-who and when, then you have to collate and print bills, send them out, track payment (and non-payment), etc. Perhaps that is the reason for the popularity of the new all-you-can-eat plans (like mine from Verizon).
Wifi is a service that is difficult to bill for, and more difficult to use if authentication and billing are required. Treat the service like streetlights.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain